From Pawns to Pipelines: Learning Flink Through the Mind of a Chess Player

Streaming systems and chess have more in common than you think: both revolve around sequences, state, timing, and pattern recognition. This talk introduces Apache Flink through the lens of chess - using the familiar game to make real-time concepts more accessible to engineers and data practitioners of all levels.

We’ll explore how core Flink abstractions map naturally to chess ideas:

Streams as sequences of moves

Tables as the evolving board state

Windows as segments of the game (openings, tactics, endgames)

CEP (Complex Event Processing) as spotting tactics and combinations

...and more

Each concept is reinforced with practical SQL examples and real-world analogies from production Flink use cases, like customer behavior modeling and fraud detection.

This talk is designed for beginners in Flink and data streaming who want to build a solid foundation, but it also offers a fresh educational approach for instructors, solution architects, and engineers who explain Flink to others by linking abstract streaming mechanics to a concrete mental model, we aim to make Flink both intuitive and memorable. Whether your Flink skills are at 800 Elo or 2000, or you're just learning how a knight moves, you'll leave with a stronger intuition for how stream processing works